What We Believe

There is a God. He absolutely loves you.

Inside every one of us there’s a longing to be with God. However we also wrestle with this sense of separation from God… there’s a disconnect. That disconnect is often referred to as sin – it’s the actions, the thoughts, the words that lead us away from God and to a spiritual death.

God understands all this stuff going on in the human heart and about two thousand years ago He sent His Son, Jesus to reveal what God is really like and become the payment for a debt none of us could ever repay, no matter how good or consistent we thought we could be. Many people thought God was an evil task-master – someone you could never please; or someone who was distant and didn’t really care. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jesus arrived on the earth to make God known to all of us. He didn’t arrive as someone with power and position, He arrived in a humble stable and experienced all the same challenges and temptations you and I do, except He didn’t yield Himself to sin. The intriguing thing about Jesus, is that people who were so unlike Him loved to hang out with Him, and He loved hanging with them. In fact His closest friends weren’t people who had it all figured out – they were people who had some issues. Jesus had one request of the people that he hung out with, it was simply will you follow me. You see, Jesus knew if people would simply follow Him He would have the opportunity to reveal and explain God, and in doing so people would begin to understand how much God loves and accepts them. At CLC we like to say “God loves you just the way you are … but He loves you too much to leave you that way.”

It doesn’t end there… God wanted you and I to experience the community He initiated with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. He called it “church” – a community of faith devoted to following, believing, obeying Him and growing together. Church is about being together, about going through life and this journey together. God made it clear that you and I weren’t meant to do life on our own – He provides a relationship with Him and each other that gives us the support and encouragement to walk through this life.

So here we are thousands of years later and it hasn’t changed. It’s still a journey and it all begins with, “will you follow?” You’ll connect with God and in the context of His family you’ll find purpose, meaning and the courage and strength to grow and change. If we decide to believe this, we have available to us a new, full life that can start now and never stop. And it’s OK to have a lot of questions along the way.